Betjeman's biographers let the bickering begin

Appropriately for a man who apparently led two lives - one with a wife he called Philth and one with a mistress nicknamed Feeble - John Betjeman now has two biographers.

And it would be fair to say that, as we celebrate on Monday the centenary of the birth of a poet who mirrored the innermost conflicts of Englishness, his biographers like each other as much as his women did.

One writer has described the other as "old, malignant and pathetic", while in return the latter calls the former "the playground bully of contemporary English literature".

Betjeman, poet laureate and knight of letters, wistful observer of man's inherent weakness and woman's outward vulnerability, is one of those writers about whom the phrase "love him or hate him" is likely to be used.

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He arouses strong emotions and, in those that loved him as a man and love him as an author, even stronger jealousies, it would appear.

In the other is A N Wilson, the author and critic, who has just produced a smaller, but still substantial, biography condoned by Betjeman's surviving children, his estranged son Paul and his daughter, Candida Lycett-Green.

This lays out the poet's double life in a way that Hillier does not, its author deciding that it would be "impertinent" to do so while "Feeble" - Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the Duke of Devonshire - is alive. Penelope "Philth" Betjeman died in 1986, two years after her husband.

According to Hillier, Wilson, a self-styled "Betjemaniac", began the dispute in a scathing review of the second volume of the former's biography in 2002.

"What annoyed me more than anything was that he said: Hillier is not really a writer at all," the 66-year-old biographer said yesterday from his home in a former almshouse in Winchester. "He's entitled to that opinion, but my livelihood has been writing since I left university, so I wasn't too thrilled."

He said he had decided not to sue Wilson because the review appeared in The Spectator, a publication from which Hillier said he had "earned a lot of money. . . so I felt it would have been biting the hand that fed me".

Wilson's review described the book as a "mishmash" and he derided Hillier's inability to discriminate in his sources, ladling out verbatim transcripts of interviews with obscure figures in Betjeman's life.

On Monday, a memorial ceremony is to be held at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey and Hillier has been invited by the president of the Betjeman Society to give a short speech.

"I was assured that Mr Wilson won't be there, but it wouldn't faze me if he were," Hiller said. "I don't have vengeful feelings towards him. What I do feel is that he can't be allowed to get away with being the playground bully of contemporary English literature." This seems like strong stuff, although a perusal of Wilson's cuttings shows that in this newspaper in 2004, he made reference to an anonymous biographer of Betjeman (at that time there had been only one) who had taken umbrage at one of Mr W's reviews and spared no opportunity to hit back in print.

In a clear reference to the almshouse, Wilson wrote: "How utterly pitiable to be some old bachelor in a Hiram's Hospital, smock-clad like a pauper. . . dribbling resentment like the dottle from a smelly churchwarden's pipe, and with so little in his life that he has to worry his sad old head about a book review."

Hillier said that, at 66, he would admit to being old, but said that Mr Wilson at 55 "would not win a rosette in a spring chicken contest".

This week, Hillier wrote to The Daily Telegraph pointing out that Wilson's biography leant heavily on his own research, and expressed surprise at not being mentioned in the acknowledgments.

Wilson yesterday said: "I'm not going to make any comment about Bevis Hillier. I was asked to write this book by Betjeman's daughter. And I made a conscious decision when I began to rely entirely on the personal recollections of people who had known him and on manuscripts and I kept to that very firmly. I used a huge archive of poems which had never been used.

"Principally, the letters of his wife which are in the British Library which have never been used although they are on open access. I also used many other letters and other writings: some of them are in a museum, some of them are in my private collection."

He declined to discuss Hillier's place in the acknowledgments, but agreed that he had used a different approach.

"I have given a clear portrait of him. Those who have known him say this is a likeness. I am very happy."

Mrs Lycett Green was diplomacy personified: "They are two completely different biographies and my edition of my father's letters is in the middle."

Asked about the simmering row between the biographers, she said: "I haven't seen any of it myself, but I know that there is something of a war going on."

She demurred from Wilson's statement that she had commissioned him to write his biography, saying: "It was through another person that I condoned it."

But she preferred to concentrate on the huge national celebration of her father's life occasioned by the centenary.

"It's wonderful. All these people are taking their hats off to him and it's almost as if he was here again.